Shira Markoff

Shira Markoff is a mobility fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has more than 15 years of experience in promoting policies and programs that help families with low incomes build financial stability, advance economic equity, and narrow the racial and ethnic wealth divide. Previously, she was a senior policy fellow at Prosperity Now, where she developed and led strategies to advance policies that build wealth and financial stability across the lifecycle and address the racial wealth divide. Markoff holds a Master of Public Policy degree from American University and a B.A. in history from Rutgers University.

Rajesh Nayak

Rajesh D. Nayak is a fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School and a consultant on labor policy and organizational transitions. Most recently, Nayak served as the assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Labor, overseeing the department’s regulatory agenda, forward-looking policy development, and evaluation offices. He previously served in a range of senior roles at the Labor Department during the Obama-Biden administration, including as the Secretary of Labor’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, and Senior Counsel to the Solicitor.

Outside of government, Nayak has worked in nonprofit organizations both as an attorney and a senior leader. He was the deputy executive director of the National Employment Law Project, where he helped to lead the organization’s restructuring and managed its senior leadership. He previously worked as an attorney at NELP, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and the Shriver Center in Chicago.

Nayak earned an undergraduate degree in public policy from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Yale.

Rohini Kosoglu

Rohini Kosoglu is a venture partner at Fusion Fund, a venture firm focused on early-stage health care and technology investments, a policy fellow at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a visiting fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Kosoglu is a leading national expert in domestic policy and a veteran of the White House and the U.S. Senate, most recently serving as deputy assistant to the president and domestic policy advisor to the vice president in the White House.

While working in the White House, Kosoglu served as a key advisor during the creation and implementation of the American Rescue Plan, including the national response to the COVID-19 crisis, as well as on the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the CHIPS Act. Before serving in the White House, Kosoglu served for more than a decade in the U.S. Senate, as chief of staff to former Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and on the staffs of Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

Kosoglu also serves on several boards and advises across the public and private sectors. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a former resident fellow at the Harvard University Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan and her M.A. from George Washington University.

Michael Linden

Michael Linden is a senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He has more than 15 years of experience in economic policy roles, ranging from government service to think tanks to advocacy organizations. Immediately prior to joining Equitable Growth, Linden served in the Biden Administration and was a senior advisor and then the executive associate director at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he worked on a wide array of public policies and was integrally involved in producing the President’s budget. Linden also previously served as a senior advisor on the Senate Budget and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committees under the leadership of Sen. Patty Murray. Linden was the founding Executive Director of the Groundwork Collaborative, as well as the inaugural managing director for policy and research at The Hub Project. He also was the managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress. Linden earned his B.A. in political science and government from Brown University, and his Master of Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a visiting fellow at Equitable Growth. His teaching and research focuses on understanding the intersection between politics and markets in the United States, the politics of policy design, and labor policy. He is co-director of Columbia’s Labor Lab, which uses social science tools in partnership with labor organizations to build worker power.

Hertel-Fernandez recently returned to Columbia after serving in the Biden-Harris Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. While at the Department of Labor, he led research and evaluation to support policymaking, including launching initiatives to study and address disparities in access to Unemployment Insurance; build a research base to understand how to improve worker power and organizing across the federal government; and to better measure job quality. He also led the department’s implementation of President Joe Biden’s historic executive order on racial equity. At the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Hertel-Fernandez led efforts to expand public participation and community engagement in the regulatory process, reduce burdens in access to government benefits, and served as the lead handling White House review of regulations and forms related to nutrition and food assistance, support for underserved farmers, and rural development.

Hertel-Fernandez is the author or co-author of three books, including most recently The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (Cambridge, 2021, with Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen), which lays out a new framework for assessing the evolution of distinctive political and economic institutions in the United States in comparative perspective. His previous book, State Capture (Oxford, 2019), examined how wealthy donors, businesses and trade associations, and political entrepreneurs built cross-state organizations to reshape policy across the United States—with implications for democracy, accountability, inequality, and political representation. His first book, Politics at Work (Oxford, 2018), examined changing patterns of political mobilization in the workplace.

Hertel-Fernandez received his B.A. in political science from Northwestern University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University.